A number of stages are involved in the marketing, design, manufacture and packaging of a product and its delivery to a point of sale and ultimately to a consumer. For example, a product such as sultanas may be stored in a plastic bag within a small carton or primary pack, a number of these cartons may be stored together in a larger carton with the larger cartons being placed inside a box. A number of boxes are then stored on a single pallet for transportation of the products from one location to another. Ultimately the boxes containing the cartons are delivered to a point of sale, such as a supermarket, or to place of end consumption.
With the number of stages involved in the packaging and transportation of a product it is clear that a change at one stage of the packaging chain—for example in the primary pack in which the sultanas are boxed—can cause a number of flow on changes to other stages in the chain. For example, if the company selling the sultanas decides to include twenty per cent more sultanas in each carton in an effort to boost sales of sultanas, this will A require some adjustment of the filling machinery in order to increase the capacity of each bag. As a result, the cartons in which the bags will be placed need to be redesigned, not only so they are of the optimum size but also to incorporate the company's graphical images such as trade marks and perhaps a reference to the new size. If it is necessary to pack, for example, twelve cartons of sultanas in each larger carton, the cartons may need to be re-sized. If the boxes are the same size, the arrangement of cartons inside individual boxes may need to be changed. The result of this may be that it is not possible to pack the cartons as efficiently in the existing boxes. Therefore, while there may be an increase in the amount of sultanas carried in individual primary packs, the efficiency in terms of weight of sultanas per box may be reduced. An alternative, would be to re-size the box to seek more efficient packing in terms of weight of sultanas per box. However, the change of size in the box may mean that graphics on the box need to be reworked in order to fit within certain requirements for the location of graphics on the boxes—for example the location of trade marks or other markings relative to industry standard markings such as a bar code on a particular portion of a box or product contents labels—all of which may be positioned on the packaging in industry standardized positions. Such fixed requirements may mean that the graphics chosen by the company for the box are no longer able to fit on the box thus requiring redesign. Further, re-sizing the box may mean that less boxes can be stacked on an individual pallet.
In addition to the above, a redesign of packaging can sometimes cause problems at the point of sale of the product. For example, products designed for sale in supermarkets are usually designed to maximize shelf utilisation as the producer of the product generally must pay for the shelf space, particularly eye level shelf space. Thus, a redesign of packaging may affect the arrangement of the product on the shelf and can in some instances result in less exposure of the product to the purchaser for a given shelf space than other packaging designs.
A change in packaging size may mean that the material from which the packaging is made will need to be changed or the thickness or strength may need to be changed to accommodate for the extra bulk and/or weight.
Thus, there may be one or more design parameters involved which ideally should not be changed, or at least without alerting the consequences of the change to persons responsible for the packaging design.
It will be seen that changes at different stages of the packaging chain can have a very large number of flow on or flow back effects. The packaging industry's approach to dealing with this matter has been essentially empirical—i.e. to provide a packaging customer with a limited range of options which are all known to provide reasonably workable solutions. Any changes to packaging are then simply carried over from one step to another in a largely independent linear manner. Further, tools have been developed for local optimization of particular processes such as the arrangement of cartons within a box.
One problem with such known arrangements is the difficulty for the customer to know what impact changes made at one stage of the packaging chain will have on other stages. Taking the example given above, marketing research may have indicated that consumers would be more likely to purchase the company's product if that product was supplied in twenty per cent larger quantity. This leads to the company redesigning its packaging to accommodate twenty per cent more sultanas. This requires the company to source bags of a different size and redesign the primary pack cartons in which the sultanas are sold to consumers. The company decides to re-size the packaging by increasing the height of individual cartons by twenty per cent. The changes to the product prove successful and sales increase but unfortunately, the increase in sales does not translate to a substantial increase in profit because the changes to the packaging have introduced inefficiencies into the rest of the packaging chain.
Current attempts to deal with this situation revolve around local optimization of solutions—for example say, identifying the best solution for packing a particular box. However, there is no practical way of determining whether the current solution or method of packaging is a particularly efficient one, in relation to the entire packaging chain, or whether, for example, the capacity of the carton of sultanas could have been increased by twenty per cent by combined adjustments of its depth and width without the consequential reduction in cost efficiency. That is to say, existing systems cannot measure whether it is possible to change dimensions without trading off cost efficiencies. Further, it should be noted that a number of changes can be made at different stages of the packaging chain, for example to decide to replace eight cartons of sultanas in a carton instead of twelve because of a change in supermarket stocking requirements. Obviously, whichever aspect of the packaging chain changes there is a possibility that there will be a flow on effect. Such flow on effects may impact adversely on overall efficiency and therefore it would be advantageous to provide a technique for identifying the ramifications of changes at various stages in the packaging process which have flow on effects. Furthermore, it would be advantageous to provide a tool for analysing the impact of proposed changes before they are implemented or at least to provide a guide to the ramifications.
A further problem with existing packaging systems is that it is difficult to compare different packaging styles. For example, it may be that the most efficient shape for a wine cask (in Australia wine sold in boxes, with an internal bag containing the wine, are known colloquially as casks, they are also commonly referred to as bag in box styles) is a rectangular prism. Such rectangular prism shaped casks may be more susceptible to damage than an octagonal prism shaped cask. It would be advantageous to provide a system which allows comparison between packaging styles which takes into account a number of their characteristics such as strength, ease of opening, packing efficiency.